I am a novice brewer, having just brewed my second batch of beer. I chose the "Jason's Extra Special Bitter" recipe at Beer Tools. Everything appeard to be going well, except the original specific gravity. It was 1.070 versus 1.053 predicted. Today I racked the beer and, while transferring from the plastic fermenter to the 5 gallon carboy, I noted that I had only about 4 gallons of liquor. I added about one gallon of water to make-up 5 gallons. The specific gravity was 1.02 before I added the water and remained the same after. How might I have affected the quality of my finished product by adding the make-up water?

I am also fairly new to brewing, I started in Feb of 2004 and have just completed my 4th
batch of beer.

I bellieve I have learned enough over the last months of brewing to confidently say that you
have not harmed the quality of your brew unless your addition made significant splashing to
aerate your partially fermented wort.

As you may alredy know the only time you want to splash or aerate is directly after your boil and
cool before you pitch yeast.

I would say if the addition was gentle you should be ok.

Even if it did splash I would still finish the batch and bottle it. just to see how it turns out.